U.S. MARINE GUNNERY SERGEANT Kyle Swanson was in the Mixing Bowl, punching without much success through the clogged web of highways around Washington, D.C., getting away from the Pentagon parking lot, inch by inch, heading for a shootout in the Ghost House. The tinted windows of the gray Taurus rental were closed tight, and the air conditioner fought bravely against the thousands of exhaust pipes in the rush hour traffic and the stifling heat of late August. There was a reason that politicians and lobbyists abandoned Washington to the tourists and the nation to its fate in the teeth of the brutal summer, and he was happy to be leaving for a few days as the highways, monuments, and stone government buildings sucked up the hard rays of the burning sun and cooked. The TV weather people had showed their maps and grimly explained that it was unseasonably hot, as if it hadn’t happened every year since the government moved here from Philadelphia a couple of centuries ago. A taxi probably headed for Dulles swerved in front of a white SUV, which braked hard, causing a tailgating sedan to swerve into an adjoining lane, and traffic in two lanes died a temporary honking and swearing death. Swanson stopped, found a sports talk radio station on the Sirius, and waited for a report on the close of training camp for the New England Patriots or the pennant race for the Boston Red Sox. In three minutes everyone was lurching forward again.

He rode the I-395 southwest and gradually put the District of Columbia in his rearview mirrors.